Book review: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Published on Sunday 21 February 2010 11:45

REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO David Shields Hamish Hamilton, £17.99

FOR a moment this week, I thought the lovely people in Penguin's publicity department had orchestrated an entire news story just to garner coverage for David Shields' manifesto for 21st-century arts. In Germany, a 17-year-old author named Helene Hegemann had been receiving rave reviews for her novel Axolotl Roadkill, in which a bereaved teenage girl plunges into the hedonistic Berlin nightclub scene. Then it transpired that parts were plagiarised from a novel entitled Strobo, written by a blogger called Airen.

Amidst the accusations and anger, Der Spiegel defended Hegemann on the basis that her entire book, like modernist classics such as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, was a bricolage of different un-footnoted sources. It was a "found text", rather like former poet laureate Andrew Motion's An Equal Voice which used copious extracts from a non-fiction book, A War Of Nerves. These issues are at the heart of Shields' rallying cry. Art, he argues, has become phoney, portentous and hermetic, and requires an urgent transfusion of reality.

There is something quixotically noble about writing a manifesto, and I commend Shields for retaining his faith that our aesthetic choices are more significant and urgent than deciding whether we go to Starbucks or Costa for coffee. He contends that an art that truly reflects our postmodern existence must necessarily incorporate non-fiction. He cites Michael Moore: "We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times." This leads Shields to praise forms as diverse as sampling (especially the illegal Grey Album by Danger Mouse, which merged The Beatles' The White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album); mash-ups (although he doesn't mention it, the wonderful version of The Shining remade as a romantic comedy is well worth a look); and the cinema verit of movements like Lars von Trier's Dogme 95. It leads him to investigate the paradox of "reality television", the eerie installation art-photography of Sophie Calle, the comedy of Sarah Silverman and the moral outrage over fake memoirs such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces – a book which caused such consternation because it pretended to be true. Shields also practises what he preaches: Reality Hunger is a patchwork of quotations, from sources as diverse as Nietzsche and DJ Spooky. One quote he doesn't deploy is the famous quip of Jean Giraudoux: "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

Above all, this impressively wide-ranging overview settles on the "lyrical essay" as the pre-eminent genre of the future. Combing through the sometimes undigested lists of works that Shields admires, the "lyrical essay" would encompass writers like Sven Lindqvist, WG Sebald, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Elizabeth Hardwick: a pantheon with which it would be foolish to quibble. This is a book that anyone interested in writing or reading should read, and perhaps is less of a manifesto than he believes, and more of a State of the Nation address.

Given that I admire the work Shields admires, and given how refreshing I find it to see writers and critics nailing their colours to the mast, rather than blandly miring themselves in relativism, I couldn't understand at first why I had a tinnitus of niggles reading Reality Hunger. In part, it was due to Shields rather gauchely plumping the book up with his own reviews and letters to author-acquaintances. But that's a breach of etiquette, not ethics. I was concerned by some obvious factual errors: it was Apuleius not Lucian who wrote The Golden Ass. In part, it was reading an inspiring or eloquent line and flicking to the notes, only to discover it was written by John D'Agata or Ben Marcus or William Gass. The book began to look like a buffet party, with the sources bringing the dishes and the host providing the napkins (Geoff Dyer should get Endorsement of the Year for his pre-publicity quote: "Reading it, I kept thinking 'yes, exactly, I wish I'd said that' and then realised I had").

In part, it was an admittedly middle-aged tetchiness about manifestos in general. If there is such a thing, I had dj lu: already read it. Shields advocates the blurring of genres, the collage of the real and the imaginary: so did Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Shields worries that novels have the neatness and excitement life lacks: so did Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott. Shields praises concision, allusiveness, wit: so did Callimachus when the Alexandrian Library still stood. Reality Hunger is not, as the blurb proclaims, "provocative" or "incendiary": rather, it's the latest move in an ongoing game between necessary iconoclasm and impossible perfection in art.

I think my real uneasiness at Reality Hunger is that it is roughly what I would have said if I'd been asked for my manifesto about literature. And reading, I think, is about the startle of thinking differently. I really hope Reality Hunger inspires some young writer out there to think: "That's exactly what I've always been fighting against".

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on 21 February 2010